At the annual conference of the European Society for Empirical Legal Studies (ESELS), held in Toulouse in June 2025, Dr. Mojca Plesničar and Dr. Dean Lipovac presented the first stage of the Sentrix project – a comprehensive and methodologically innovative literature review in the field of sentencing. Their presentation, titled Rethinking Sentencing Research: Scoping Literature Review, was part of a panel on penal policy and criminal justice.
In their presentation, the authors highlighted the methodological, conceptual, and technical challenges that arise when attempting to establish a systematic, interdisciplinary, and at the same time open approach to understanding the existing body of literature on sentencing. The project’s research team developed a modular approach to literature mapping that goes beyond traditional systematic reviews. Using language models (such as ChatGPT) and a structured coding process, the team created an extensive taxonomy comprising over 280 topics and subtopics, which were integrated into a transparent database. This database enables analysis of conceptual proximity between publications, methodological comparisons, and the identification of thematic intersections.
Rather than merely categorizing the literature, the first phase of the project focused on uncovering relationships within the research field, which is often fragmented due to diverse terminologies and disciplinary approaches. At the conference, the co-authors presented this methodological framework along with the initial findings from the process.
The presentation attracted significant interest and sparked a discussion about the future of literature reviews in legal and criminological research.
Additionally, the system they designed enables the visualization of connections within the literature, shedding light on the structure of knowledge in the field of sentencing. It also paves the way for further empirical analyses and the development of decision-support tools within the Sentrix project.
